San Francisco Seals catcher Ray Orteig cozies up to Major, the team’s mascot, in 1950.

Photo: Bill Young / The San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Seals catcher Ray Orteig cozies up to Major, the...

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Crazy Crab had first-pitch duties before a Giants-Dodgers game at 3Com (a.k.a. Candlestick) Park in 1999.

Photo: Eric Risberg / AP

Crazy Crab had first-pitch duties before a Giants-Dodgers game at...

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Jon Kanter and other children meet Charlie O, the donkey mascot for the Oakland A's. Charlie O was a fixture at the Oakland Coliseum in the 1960s and 1970s. His handler on the left is Alexis Paras. The photo was taken on April 9, 1975.

Photo: Jerry Telfer, The Chronicle

Jon Kanter and other children meet Charlie O, the donkey mascot for...

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In 1949 high jinks that would not pass muster today, the Stanford Indian is burned in Berkeley during a pregame campfire.

Photo: Duke Downey, The Chronicle

In 1949 high jinks that would not pass muster today, the Stanford...

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June 13, 1950: Major the new San Francisco Seals mascot gets fed on the field.

Photo: Bill Young, The Chronicle

June 13, 1950: Major the new San Francisco Seals mascot gets fed on...

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Sourdough Sam? Please! Bring back Clementine.

Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle

Sourdough Sam? Please! Bring back Clementine.

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A 1950 article about the new mascot for the San Francisco Seals.

Photo: Bill Young, The Chronicle

A 1950 article about the new mascot for the San Francisco Seals.

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Oakland Athletics mascot "Stomper" is attacked by the Giants' "Crazy Crab" between innings during the game vs. the San Francisco Giants at AT&T Park in San Francisco, CA on Friday, June 23, 2006. shot: 6/23/06
Darryl Bush / The Chronicle

San Francisco Seals games in 1951 didn't feature walk-up music, gourmet cuisine or Bruce Lee Tribute Night at the ballpark. With social media and smartphones still more than half a century away, people had to actually (gasp!) pay attention to the game.

But the era wasn't completely without distractions, and San Francisco's Pacific Coast League baseball team had a very memorable one: a live sea lion who lived in a tank inside the entrance of Seals Stadium. After close to five years of searching in The San Francisco Chronicle archives, I'm ready to declare Major the San Francisco Seal the greatest Bay Area mascot of all time.

In general, the Bay Area mascot situation has become worse over the years. A small part of the reason is political correctness, but mostly it's the increased distractions and white noise at games. Mascots are no longer front and center. When the Golden State Warriors effectively furloughed their Thunder mascot after the 2007 season, and didn't immediately replace him, I'm guessing most fans didn't notice. Nearly seven years later, the lack of a fan mascot is probably 5,276th on the list of Warriors fan gripes.

Some mascots have better marketing machines behind them than others. With baseball returning to San Francisco this week, Giants representative Lou Seal - sadly, just a guy in a seal suit - has the highest profile among Bay Area sports mascots. Lou is arguably followed on the local hierarchy by A's mascot Stomper the elephant, Cal Bears mascot Oski and San Jose Sharks carnivore-in-residence S.J. Sharkey.

Major not alone

When I wrote about Major on my SFGate.com blog the Big Event last month, I foolishly assumed he was the only live mascot-in-residence in Bay Area history. Older sports fans quickly reminded me that while Oakland A's mule Charlie-O may have resided outside the Oakland Coliseum, he was as frequent a visitor in the early 1970s as Catfish Hunter and Reggie Jackson. UC Berkeley reportedly dabbled with live bear mascots in the late 1930s, before adopting the more safety conscious man-in-suit version of Oski for most of the 20th century.

(Chronicle librarian/research samurai Bill van Niekerken unearthed photo evidence that the first mascot for the 49ers was a mule named Clementine. It's unclear whether the animal lived at Kezar Stadium or just roamed Golden Gate Park and wandered over for games.)

Bay Area mascots in the early years were revered. For a few weeks in 1951, there were more stories about Major the Seal than all of the actual Seals baseball players combined. The Li'l Acorn of the Oakland Oaks baseball team of the '40s and '50s (recycled for the Oaks basketball team in the 1960s) had his own comic drawn by Oakland Tribune cartoonist Lee Susman.

For decades, Stanford prominently featured Timm Williams, who dressed as the Indian "Prince Lightfoot." That ended in 1972, when Stanford leaders agreed to the request of American Indian students and chose to end the tradition of the Indian mascot.

That was a forward-thinking decision, but it was followed by a horrible ones. Think of all the badass mascots Stanford might have picked as a successor. They could have chosen the Locomotives, the Robber Barons or even the Atoms. (The linear accelerator was operational by the late 1960s.) They stuck with the Cardinal, allowing the school band to propagate that horrible tree as an unofficial school mascot.

In fact, most mascot decisions in the past 40 years have been misguided. Since my own childhood in the 1970s, the San Francisco 49ers have paraded multiple uninspiring, scraggly-bearded miner-themed mascots, each one looking more like a deranged hobo than the last.

The Oakland Raiders are in a particularly bad position, considering no mascot they choose will be cooler-looking or more crowd-friendly than the performance artists dressing up in the Black Hole. Their biggest recent disaster was the Raider Rusher mascot, little more than a giant head with arms that looks like a supersized emoticon.

The best mascot of the past 40 years was the Crazy Crab, an intentional mistake that was discharged from duty shortly after its 1984 debut. The Giants have had the sense to occasionally trot the Crab out from whatever dank AT&T Park storage locker he occupies, presumably sharing space with Rusty the Old Navy right-field robot and former outfielder Marvin Benard.

Holding a seal captive inside a ballpark for fan entertainment wouldn't work in 2014 - and not just because animal-loving fans might consider it cruelty. A seal or mule would get lost in the fireworks, playground equipment, water cannons, Grateful Dead appearances, T-shirt cannons and swarms of seagulls - not to mention the smartphones, tablet computers and short-attention-span theater on the video scoreboard.

Ruled the town

But Major ruled the town in 1951. Most of the photos in the Chronicle archives feature a ballplayer or child trying to slip a baseball cap or glove on the poor pinniped. When the crowd can be seen in the photo, everyone is transfixed. (And wearing a suit and nice fedora.) It's a serious question whether Joe DiMaggio's stay with the Seals in the 1930s was covered in as much detail.

"In keeping with baseball policy, purchase price and salary were not divulged," Chronicle reporter Darrell Wilson wrote in a 1951 article. "The Chronicle learned exclusively, however, that the seal wanted a daily diet of three pounds, preferably filet of sole, to be served in small enough quantities for easy digestion."

The Seals folded in 1957, to make room for the San Francisco Giants. Major's final resting place is unknown, but his legacy is secure: easily the coolest mascot in the history of the Bay Area.